Open Governmental Data for Scientific Research on ICT-Enabled Governance

Current Status: the struggling scientific approaches for ICT-Enabled Governance

Information and Communication Technologies have an unprecedented potential to improve the responsiveness of governments to the needs of citizens and have long been recognized as a key strategic tool to enable reforms in the public sector. During the last years, this potential of ICT has started to be dealt with in a multi-disciplinary way, engaging social sciences, complex systems theory or advanced modelling and simulation, giving birth to new research communities dealing with governance and policy modelling , public administration information systems , digital government or open, second-generation government .

However, this potential is to this day non-systematically exploited, as there are significant barriers that hinder the effective exploration, management and distribution of the vast amounts of available public sector information towards the research communities (e.g. operational data, financial performance data, process-related information, indices and metrics, key performance indicators, tacit knowledge). Furthermore, there is a shortage of experimental methods and tools that would allow effective knowledge mining, visualization or further computation, empowering the integration of information and communication technologies into government practices and their adoption by the public. In the context of governance, multiple aspects have to be taken into account (e.g. financial, social, political, administrative, legal), indicating that in order to make administrative transformation a success, a multi-disciplinary approach has to be adopted, as opposed to the sole use of ICT.

Outlook: new, open-linked data systems serving the research communities

The research communities needs new, advanced service infrastructures, incorporating distributed and diverse public sector information resources as well as data curation, semantic annotation and visualization tools, capable of supporting scientific collaboration and governance-related research from multi-disciplinary scientific communities, while also empowering the deployment of open governmental data towards citizens.

Such research infrastructures are envisaged to promote a highly synergetic approach to governance research, by providing the ground for experimentation to actors from both ICT and non-ICT related disciplines and scientific communities, as well as by ensuring that the scientific outcomes are made accessible to the citizens, so that they can monitor public service delivery and influence the decision making process.

Such new research infrastructures should aim to:

• Create an open service platform, integrating large amounts of public sector data, processing tools and resources, in support of the research communities dealing with governance and policy modelling, complex systems simulation, public administration transformation, government 2.0, information and communication technologies, future internet and social sciences.

• Engage citizens into the public service delivery decision making process, by providing accurate information on the operation, cost and overall value of public services, through user-friendly visualization tools, thus being in the forefront of emerging Open Data initiatives in Europe and the world.

• Explore synergies with current e-Infrastructure service providers so as to leverage on existing grid and cloud services for storing, processing and providing large amounts of public sector information.

• Contribute to the evolving standardisation for open and linked governmental data, consolidating various approaches for harmonization, annotation, pre-processing, anonymisation, interoperability and provision of data, from public sector administrations at national, regional or local levels, towards scientists and citizens.

• Empower and engage researchers and actors from non-ICT related disciplines, such as political science, economics, law, sociology, statistics, etc. in experimental research relating to solving complex problems of high importance for the society.

Then, a new, significant step towards evidence-based, experimental ICT-enabled governance research will have been realised ...

"Mobile Development Fiesta" at Aegean University in Samos

During 18th and 19th November 2010, more than 40 pre-graduate students were trained in Mobile Development for Windows 7 Smartphones.  The training took place within the curriculum of the Information and Communication Systems Engineering (ICSD) Department, more specifically the "Software Engineering" lesson, organised by the Information Systems Lab.

Dimitris-Ilias Gkanatsios, a Microsoft Hellas Academic Evangelist delivered more than 12 hours of dedicated, hands-on training on the brand new features of Windows 7 Mobile develoment platform.

The mobile dev training in ICSD - Uni Aegean is one of the activities leading to the empowerment of a students and graduate young engineers team for developing innovative, free mobile applications for citizens and businesses, for academic and research purposes.

A panoramic view of students and Dimitris-Ilias in ICSD Labs

New Book on Transformational Government by IGI

The "Handbook of Research on ICT-Enabled Transformational Government: A Global Perspective" provides comprehensive coverage and definitions of the most important issues, concepts, trends, and technologies within transformation stage e-government (t-government) implementation. A significant reference source within the technological and governmental fields, this Handbook of Research with 25 chapters and more than 500 pages, offers theoretical and empirical studies that communicate new insights into t-government for both researchers and practitioners interested in the subject.

The book is edited by Vishanth Weerakkody (Brunel University, UK); Marijn Janssen (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands); Yogesh K. Dwivedi (Swansea University, UK).

The book features a chapter by Charalabidis Y., Sarandis D., Askounis D., on «Knowledge-driven Project Management for achieving Electronic Government Transformation», detailing a new proposal for a project management method that targets reusability among e-Government and Government Tranformation projects.

See the book at IGI bookstore.

Practical studies in eGovernment, by Springer-Verlag

A new book titled "Practical Studies in e-Government", edited by Assar, S., Boughzala I., Boydens I. is published by Springer and is available in major bookstores. Featuring in-depth case studies of initiatives in eight countries, the book deals with such technology-oriented issues as interoperability, prototyping, data quality, and advanced interfaces, and management-oriented issues as e-procurement, e-identification, election results verification, and information privacy. The book features best practices, tools for measuring and improving performance, and analytical methods for researchers.

The book features a chapter on "Achieving Interoperability through Base Registries for Governmental Services and Documents Management", by Yannis Charalabidis and Dimitris Askounis.

Buy the book from Springer Bookstore.

New book on e-Health by PTI

A new title on electronic health has been published by PTI & ITEMS International and is available for sale in Amazon and other major bokkstores. Titled “e-Health: A Global Perspective", the book is targeting a multi-faceted presentation of e-Health best practices.

The book contains an enlightened collection of information written by 24 practitioners and researchers around the globe. This book is designed to offer insights as to the issues of the day and how various governments, institutions, and businesses are developing creative solutions utilizing the latest in technology in electronc health.

The book includes the chapter “Learning from the Past – Preparing for the future: On Medical Information Systems Evaluation”, by Thermou Y., Charalabidis Y., Maglogiannis I., presenting a novel framework for medical information sytems evaluation.

See the book in Amazon bookstore here.

Change and Enterprise 2.0: The disappearing boundaries of the enterprise and new ICT systems

The perspectives of change

As local economies still stagger getting “in and out” from the global financial crisis and as the need for sustainable economic activity and quality of life is propagating towards all societal groups, new visionary scenarios have to be constructed. The main characteristic of such visionary scenarios for enterprises, is certainly the fact of groundbreaking, rapid, sometimes disruptive, change. Within the next decade, ICT researchers and practitioners must be prepared to phase the challenges of change, that will affect FInES from multiple aspects, changing the concept of the enterprise, affecting the nature of enterprise systems and services, even redefining what are the real objectives for the ICT-enabled enterprise.

The disappearing boundaries of the enterprise

As globalisation persists, economic crisis is viewed as a recurring effect in many nations or regions, and as the quest for new markets and growth is fiercer than ever, entrepreneurship will soon touch upon every aspect of the lives of individuals. Future internet will soon have to cope with the fact of having very small enterprises (VSE’s) playing an important role in progressed economies, while governments are raising the legal barriers and technology lowers the required size or capital expenditure to start a new business. While the tendency to become larger and global will still exist for many large enterprises, a bottom-up entrepreneurial movement will in parallel bring citizens acting as service creators and providers, or employees offering the services in multiple enterprises while at the same voting for the approval of public-private partnerships, in their local municipal councils. Such examples of fusion among governmental organisations, enterprises, employees, consumers and citizens will gradually dominate the landscape, practically redefining what we mean by the word “enterprise” and posing new requirements to ICT systems and digital services.

The changing nature of enterprise systems and services
Within the scenario of “business ubiquity”, one can realise the challenges for ICT systems and services: as speed will be the most precious characteristic of businesses, fully automated and seamlessly collaborating infrastructures are to make the difference in supply chain organisation, new products time to market, or feature-based competitive pricing and sourcing. The quest for speed in businesses of all sizes will soon pose challenges for a different generation of intelligent systems (“pushing” the humans out of the everyday operations of almost all enterprise functions), as the need for end-to-end digital services that are executing in one stop, give the response in one second, with minimal costs, will be persevering.

Hervé Panetto, Nancy University, in Athens

Hervé Panetto, professor at Nancy-University, Université Henri Poincaré Nancy I and deputy director of ESIAL, School of Engineering in Information Technology, visited the Greek Interoperability Centre, on October 25th 2010. 

The two organisations share common research orientations, in the domains of Enterprise Interoperability and Future Internet  Enterprise Systems.

Prof. Hervé Panetto also joined the working meeting of the Greek Interoperability Council, an initiative supported by many organisations from research and industry in Greece, delivering an invited talk on the status and outlook of interoperability, at a global scale.

Yannis Charalabidis and Hervé Panetto in Athens